‘Marx’s economy and beyond’ is a paper jointly written by Mark Harvey and Norman Geras. Mark says
Our paper is entitled ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. It is the result of nearly two years of discussion between us, and common work, on the strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s political economy – including the labour theory of value – and the general directions that need to be taken to move forward from it.
Click here to download the paper.
Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) is taking place in Brazil on 20-22 June 2012.
The ESRC is marking Rio week by highlighting how social sciences are contributing to environmental research across a range of areas – such as societal change and policy uptake, consumer habits, employment, poverty, resource management, security, global development, low-income economies and risk mitigation.
In this video Professor Mark Harvey discusses his research on the development of drinking water infrastructures in the UK, India, Mexico and Taiwan.
Pre-industrial configurations of water and sewage in the UK (c) 2012 University of Essex
This paper, Drinking-Water and drinking water: Trajectories of Provision and Consumption in the UK, Taiwan and Delhiby Mark Harvey considers the economic sociology and political economy of drinking water infrastructures in the UK, Delhi and Taiwan to show how the emergence of all-purpose (including drinking) water was the outcome of long and varied historical processes, involving major changes in both systems of provision and patterns of consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
Resilience Model (c) University of Essex 2012
This paper, “Economic Analysis of Resilience: A Framework for Local Policy Response Based on New Case Studies“, written by Pierre Régibeau (Imperial College, London and CRA International) and Katharine Rockett (University of Essex) takes a recent set of case studies on resilience of ecocultures to form the basis for a critical review of the resilience literature and the development of a proposal for a novel resilience index.
The paper notes the diversity of definitions of resilience and the confusion this creates in implementing resilience studies and develop a synthesis view that establishes a framework for defining resilience in an implementable way. This framework emphasises the importance of defining the source of and magnitude of shocks as part of the definition.
Small area estimation and in particular the estimation of small area income deprivation has potential value in the development of new or alternative components of multiple deprivation indices. These new approaches enable the development of income distribution threshold based as opposed to benefit count based measures of income deprivation and so enable the alignment of regional and national measures such as the Households Below Average Income with small area measures. This paper briefly reviews a number of approaches to small area estimation before describing in some detail an iterative proportional fitting based spatial microsimulation approach. This approach is then applied to the estimation of small area HBAI rates at the small area level in Wales in 2003-5. The paper discusses the results of this approach, contrasts them with contemporary ‘official’ income deprivation measures for the same areas and describes a range of ways to assess the robustness of the results.
A version of this paper has been accepted for inclusion as a chapter in: Tanton, R., & Edwards, K . (2012) Spatial Microsimulation: A Reference Guide for Users, Springer.
Essex Sociology’s new ‘Research Bytes‘ YouTube channel includes interviews with Professor Mark Harvey and Professor Miriam Glucksmann. Mark discusses his research on the tomato and on new approaches to sustainable biofuels and land-use whilst Miriam describes her recent research on work and especially the new paradigm of ‘consumption work‘.
Mark Harvey and Felix Behling‘s work on false employment in the construction industry is gathering media attention:
These tax-evasive labour practises practices are estimated to cost the UK tax payer conservatively £1.7 billion per year.
A number of papers have recently been published by CRESI staff and colleagues on the issue of bio-fuels.
The first, by Sarah Pilgrim and Mark Harvey reports a series of interviews with staff at a number of NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, RSPB, Friends of the Earth) and suggests that in many cases the development of NGO policy has been driven more by narrow political opportunities for influence than by broader and more coherent policy responses to global climate change or economic development, or indeed rigorous assessment of the scientific evidence. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing in the 29th October 2010 issue of Science Mark Harvey and co-authors outline how the development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, presents the biomedical research community with unprecedented challenges for the management, archiving, and distribution of data and bioresources. In this context scientific progress depends on efficient and open sharing to generate maximum value.
They suggest that despite this the provision of public funding for these long-term repositories does not fall into the traditional model of science funding and so although funding agencies may exhort their experimental investigators to develop a “dissemination plan” for the data and bioresources they develop, in reality, such requirements are often not fulfilled with few if any consequences. Read the rest of this entry »
This book, edited by Mark Harvey is about how to understand the huge variety of markets and market organisation in contemporary economies through a dialogue between a group of UK and French scholars. It presents a critique and development of institutional views of markets, and ‘puts markets in their place’ in a wider political and social context.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis in markets, the book makes a topical and significant contribution on the importance of the rules and regulations that constitute markets, and their broader political and legal frameworks. Moreover, the disruption of markets brings to the fore their interconnection with the broader economy, with production, distribution and consumption in a way often ignored at the height of market bubbles.
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